'The Good Wife' Delivers A Game-Changing Stunner

This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Last Sunday, on the CBS drama series "The Good Wife," something major and unexpected happened. If you don't yet know what occurred, and don't wish to, now is the time to stop listening for a few minutes. For the past few years, whenever I've been challenged to name a series on broadcast TV that's the equal of shows produced for cable or streaming networks, my instant go-to example has been "The Good Wife" on CBS. And boy, did series creators Robert and Michelle King prove that this past weekend.

Major unexpected plot twists have been a hallmark of this series from the beginning. Juliana Margulies, as attorney Alicia Florrick, has made sudden surprise changes in her life over the show's five seasons. Change never has been as pronounced as this season, though, when Alicia quit her job to start a rival law firm, putting her in an adversarial relationship with her former bosses and mentors, Diane Lockhart, and Will Gardner. Gardner, played by Josh Charles, had been her lover as well. But for most of this season, they've been cold and hostile to one another - yet, that coldness was beginning to thaw.

Two weeks ago, an episode heavy on flashbacks showed how Will ended up hiring Alicia. And in the most recent episode, Will and Alicia had a quick and sweet moment at the Cook County courthouse where she pulls him aside after watching him defend an accused murderer in court.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD WIFE")

JOSH CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) What's going on?

JULIANNA MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) The Grants called me for a second opinion on your trial.

CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) You're kidding me.

MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) No. I told him no.

CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) Then why are you here?

MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) I decided to warn you. I was thinking if I was in your shoes and I had a client calling behind my back, I would want to know.

BIANCULLI: That ended up being their last moment together. Alicia ran off to a luncheon where she was a guest of honor and Will resumed defense of his client. At one point, Will was called to the bench for a sidebar with the judge and the opposing lawyer. The scene shifted to the defendant's point of view as he got more and more agitated. Voices muffled. Menacing music began to build on the soundtrack, and the defendant looked frantically around the courtroom to the lawyers and the judge, to his parents, to the closed courtroom door. And finally, to the guards unclipped holster with its revolver within reach. It was an intensely and impressively constructed scene, made even more intense by a sudden shift of locales to the courtroom next door, where Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski, was arguing an unrelated case. She hears and reacts to the sound of gunfire. Then, so does her firm's chief investigator, Kalinda, played by Archie Panjabi, who instantly phones 911.

BIANCULLI: Kalinda goes running through the chaos to the adjacent courtroom and soon learns - along with the viewing audience - that Will has been seriously wounded.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD WIFE")

PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) Will?

BARANSKI: (as Diane Lockhart) Dammit, Kalinda, back off.

PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) My boss is in there.

BIANCULLI: A few scenes later, we get surprised again, as Kalinda and Diane go to the hospital and eventually discover Will on a gurney, covered with a sheet, already pronounced dead.

This was a main character killed unexpectedly and with absolutely no leakage from the press or elsewhere on the Internet, and it was a stunner. The next night, Josh Charles, who played Will, even showed up on "Late Show with David Letterman," with a suitably stunned introduction from his host.

(LAUGHTER)

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN)

DAVID LETTERMAN: Our next guest stars on the very popular CBS television series, "The Good Wife," and guess what? Last night he was killed off the show.

BIANCULLI: More and more, primary TV characters are getting killed all the time these days. "The Walking Dead" gets rid of more cast members each week than "American Idol." And even shows as different as "Downton Abbey" and "Justified" will build up major characters only to unexpectedly mow them down. But usually, word leaks out beforehand about the plot or in actor's contract dispute, so pulling off a total surprise as "The Good Wife" just did is a big deal. And for fans of quality television, it's a very good deal.

In the earliest days of TV, when drama anthology shows were produced live and were like weekly little movies, characters and stories changed each week, so it was easy to put the main characters in genuine jeopardy. But once television evolved to weekly drama series, for the first few decades, the heroes almost lived and returned and one episode was pretty much interchangeable with another.

One exception early was on ABC's "Naked City" in the late 1960's, when the leading character of that cop show, played by John McIntyre, was killed in a fiery car crash. And the closest early precedent to what happened to Will Gardner on "The Good Wife" occurred on the CBS series "The White Shadow." That was a drama series produced by Bruce Paltrow before he did "St. Elsewhere," starring Ken Howard as the basketball coach of a squad of inner-city high school kids.

In one 1980 episode, one of the high school players went to a bigger store to score some booze for his friends and got caught in the middle of a robbery and killed by a stray bullet. That happened almost 35 years ago and I still remember it vividly because on TV in those days, that sort of random and fatal violence just didn't happen in a drama series. A third of a century later, TV - when it's in the right hands and handled just the right way - can still shock us like that. Taking our TV characters away can really register and be worth talking about as part of the national conversation, but only if they're written and performed well enough in the first place. Will Gardner, thanks to Josh Charles and his collaborators on "The Good Wife," certainly was. I miss Will already, but I have a feeling the remaining shows this season are going to be amazing.

Coming up...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "NOAH")

RUSSELL CROWE: (as Noah) It begins.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is used to reviewing movies that features a major story arc. But this time the ark is the story. He reviews the new biblical epic "Noah" starring Russell Crowe. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.